An Interesting Thought on Fan Theories

So, I didn't write this. I wish I did, because It's brilliant, but that credit goes to the person who goes by the screen name ChateauArusi. It's an essay length response (which I'm usually against), but this is so well articulated that I had to share. So without further ado... (here's the link to the original article the comment was on; it's pretty swell too: http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/05/21/why-the-latest-mad-max-fan-theory-is-a-crock-of-shit#comment-2037935460)

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"Time for me to share a pet theory. Not about the continuity of Mad Max, or about fanboys. But about the human impulse to take stories apart and understand them.

Because this is a very, very old impulse. It predates movies and comic books. You can find the instinct as far back as you look.

Let's take Bishop James Ussher, who is most famous for going through the Bible, carefully sequencing the events and begats, adding up all the characters' ages, and in general attempting to apply fanboy-style obsessiveness to Scripture. He wound up pinning the date of creation to exactly the year of 4004 BC. Not 4000 plus or minus, but precisely 4004.

There were two responses to this, which make perfect sense in retrospect: some people latched onto his analysis, and regarded it as authoritative; and a lot of other people rolled their eyes and/or just laughed at him. And not years later, but at the time.

There is something about narrative that tickles us very deeply in the root of our brain. We appreciate narrative not just as a collection of events, but as a sequence of events that teaches us something and illuminates the world. The more coherent that sequence, the more internally consistent it is, the more closely dependent the subsequent events are on preceding events, the more satisfying the narrative is to us.

Look at a movie like Hot Fuzz, where there is barely a wasted shot or line of dialogue. We find that insanely satisfying, because of how beautifully constructed, how tight, it is. No matter how deep we dig, we find consistency and cross-reference. And we love it.

But some of us, as observed in the article, take it to an extreme. Every movie, every television show, every novel and short story and serially published penny dreadful, has continuity errors. Some of their creators made, and make, mistakes. Some were sloppy. And some didn't care at all to maintain tight quality control over the sequence of events.

Look at how many people have devoted so many hours to figuring out the continuity of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Where, exactly, did Watson get shot? Was he shot only once, inconsistently described, or was he shot twice, and each time it comes up, he simply fails to mention the other one? Either way, why?

The obvious answer is that Doyle didn't care overmuch. It's an author's error, insofar as a gap in the verisimilitude of the story can be said to be an "error" at all. It's a work of fiction. You either enjoy it or you don't. Most people enjoy Sherlock Holmes just fine, and ignore this and a hundred other little inconsistencies. For a minority of people, working out how to reconcile these inconsistencies is an additional source of enjoyment. And for a small minority, the existence of these inconsistencies ruins the experience. It must be perfect, or it didn't happen.

Which is the key to my pet theory: the idea that all of this "happened."

It's fiction. Obviously it didn't really "happen" in any sense of objective reality. But there is something about storytelling, about narrative, that allows us to imaginethat something happened. And it is exactly that act of imagination that triggers something fundamental in our brains, and provides insight into the way we see the world.

Look at a non-fiction newspaper article. What do we call it? A "story." We use a word that we normally think of as applying to a fictional vignette to describe a piece of factual reportage. Then, on consideration, we realize that we tell each other stories all the time. Here's the story of how I got thrown out of college. Here's the story about how I got drunk and felt up my own mom in Mexico. Seriously, it's a true story. And then think about that phrase, "true story." We say that when we promise that the story we are telling "actually, really, happened, no foolin'." And that causes us to engage on an even deeper level.

Consider this fact: Every single religion in the world encodes its teachings in the form of narrative. Jesus's lessons aren't just a list of things you should do; they are delivered in the context of a speech he gave standing on a hill. Buddha doesn't tell us to beware of our limited perspective; he tells us a story about five blind men fondling various parts of an elephant. The Islamic imam doesn't just tell you that using profanity is bad, he tells you the story of Mahmoud walking down the street and meeting an old woman with a potty mouth.

Personally, I think that narrative — a structured series of events, with a beginning state, subsequent development, and resulting outcome — is the oldest form of human technology. It is a tool, just like a flint for starting fires, or a net for catching fish. It is a mental tool, but it is a necessary prerequisite for physical tools. Start with this black shiny rock. Hit it like this, and like this. Observe how it breaks off in flakes. Touch a flake. Note the sharp edge. Keep striking the main rock. The result: a large sharp axehead for hunting, and several small stone blades for cleaning the animal and scraping its hide afterward. Without the first-then-finally conceptual structure, you don't even bother start hitting the rock except by accident.

Narrative is planning. Narrative is illumination. Narrative is meaning.

The fanboys who are trying to "make sense" of the overall Mad Max story are, obviously, doing it wrong. They are reading the type of story incorrectly. It is mythology, a loose storytelling tradition that is intended to teach lessons and offer insight into life and existence, much more than it is journalism.

But even mythology has been subject to this impulse. There are hundreds and hundreds of years of musings about the "proper" order in which Hercules performed his Twelve Labors. It doesn't matter at all. But people still do it, because for some reason, it's important to them.

My point is that, yes, the attempt to rationalize the continuity of Mad Max is futile, and more importantly it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the kind of narrative being laid out. But it is also shortsighted and damagingly smug to simply dismiss that impulse to rationalize as being some sort of modern phenomenon, a man-child dysfunction born of comic-book obsession by people on the spectrum. It's not. It's a very old and very human need to try to make our stories make sense. And the more meaningful we find those stories, the more deeply we need those stories to hold together, because that makes them more "real" and therefore more meaningful.

End of pet theory."